


Not Only Newsprint

by voleuse



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-10
Updated: 2009-08-10
Packaged: 2017-10-04 06:24:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voleuse/pseuds/voleuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>She tries to help them before the patterns of tides reach their lives.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Only Newsprint

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the anime series, but not the movie. Title and summary adapted from Kelli Russell Agodon's _Of a Forgetful Sea_.

01\. **speak**  
The tilt of an axle or a twisted wire often make more sense to her than words.

02\. **touch**  
After a long day, the dry warmth of Pinako's hand on her shoulder sometimes startles Winry.

03\. **memory**  
Winry can recite, in chronological and alphabetical order, every piece of machinery she's ever fixed.

04\. **vanilla**  
In the summer, Pinako makes ice cream in an old churn, and while she eats Winry contemplates the ways she could replicate the mechanism.

05\. **chocolate**  
Al used to share his chocolate bars with Winry, and she liked the ones with the shiny silver wrappers best.

06\. **ways and means**  
Pinako mumbles under her breath when the tax collector comes--it's the only time Winry ever hears her curse.

07\. **belief**  
Ed recites the elements like a prayer, or an incantation, but Winry stopped contemplating the gods long ago.

08\. **linger**  
She only ever sees Wrath at the edges of her vision, and he speaks a word to any of them.

09\. **illuminance**  
Her nightmares are houses aflame, flashes of gunpowder, and metal glinting as it melts.

10\. **ornament**  
Ed's crankiness wears on her, and she threatens to reclaim his arm for artist's scrap.

11\. **_coup de foudre_**  
Pinako puts a wrench into Winry's hands, her face solemn and filled with hope; Winry is four and a half.

12\. **archway**  
Late at night, after Al falls silent, Ed tells her about the gate, and she shivers.

13\. **fate**  
One afternoon, Sheska asks Winry if she's ever wanted to be a doctor, instead, and Winry only laughs.

14\. **pulse**  
The way metal grinds beneath her hands sometimes feels more alive to her than flesh.

15\. **envelope**  
Occasionally, Ed's mail will be routed to the Rockbell home, where Winry keeps each letter safe in the second drawer of her desk.

16\. **cold**  
After she brazes the joints together, Winry opens the window of her workshop, until the heat stops teasing at her fingers.

17\. **need**  
She laughs at Sheska's compulsive sprint into the bookstore, but she does the same thing when they pass a shelf of hardware.

18\. **drunk**  
The only time Ed has ever frightened her is when he stared hard at a bottle of spirits, twirled it in his hand, before returning it to the shelf with a careless shrug.

19\. **mask**  
In the winter, when she sits next to her grandmother in the firelight, Winry asks her about her past, but Pinako only smiles.

20\. **rose**  
She puts three flowers on Trisha Elric's grave every year--a lily for Trisha, a rose for her parents, and a forget-me-not for Ed, wherever he is.

21\. **two**  
There are times, as Winry travels with the Elrics, when she feels she might as well not be there at all.

22\. **fresh**  
All the vegetables in the city taste duller, dustier than the ones at home.

23\. **bribe**  
On the train, Ed blusters at the conductor, flashing his watch to get a better cabin, while Winry quietly slips an attendant a few coins.

24\. **error**  
The first time Winry attempts to craft automail, Pinako looks it over, and tells her, "Once more, and slowly."

25\. **appetite**  
The fourteenth time Winry works on automail, on her own, Pinako brings her supper to the workshop, pats her on the shoulder, and nods three times.

26\. **refrain**  
While she dusts in the house, Pinako hums under her breath; it's several years before Winry recognizes it as her mother's lullaby.

27\. **family**  
She hates that she can't remember her parents, sometimes not even their faces.

28\. **grieve**  
She loved Trisha Elric too, but she never mentions it.

29\. **vapor**  
Winry can guess what Pinako has worked on, or the boys have conjured--she can smell the difference between copper and nickel, between gold and iron.

30\. **tea**  
She'll let coffee sit in its mug until it's cold, but if Al brings her tea, Winry picks up the cup and breathes in the steam.

31\. **medicine**  
She tries to spit the taste of castor oil from her mouth, and Al asks her to tell him, exactly please, why.

32\. **moth**  
At night, on the train, she watches an insect buzz around the dim lights, its feet dragging against the plastic casing in dull thuds.

33\. **perfect**  
Winry is nine when she finally accepts even metal can have imperfections.

34\. **rope**  
One of the hinges on her valise is loose, and Winry uses twine to secure it, never thinking to ask one of the boys for a repair.

35\. **wind**  
In the city, Winry can't even hear the breeze over the clatter of sound, and that's when she realizes how much she misses home.

36\. **crossroads**  
Sheska looks at Winry, sidelong, and asks if maybe she'd come visit her again, in Central City.

37\. **summer**  
There is an apple tree growing, where the Elric house used to stand, and Winry climbs high, plucks the last ripe apples from their hiding place.

38\. **candy**  
They never eat taffy, neither Winry nor Pinako, for fear of the sugar, inexorably gumming up in delicate gears.

39\. **photograph**  
It startles her sometimes, to see Al, and realize anew how the years haven't touched him.

40\. **spoon**  
Sometimes Winry forgets she's eating dinner, and starts twisting her spoon into the shape of her next project.

41\. **forest**  
Winry lives her life in two parts, machine and mountain, wrench and flowering twigs, but she never feels the dissonance.

42\. **mirror**  
She uses her mirror when she ties her hair back, or washes grease from her face, but not for much else.

43\. **smoke**  
Sometimes clients find her in the shop, face shielded, blowtorch in hand as she welds, and they seem surprised.

44\. **shine**  
Winry used to polish Al's armor as they talked, and sometimes she misses that, and her hands feel too idle.

45\. **balloon**  
Rose's baby shrieks with laughter when Winry rubs the red balloon against her hair, and even Rose smiles, a little bit.

46\. **vine**  
There is an art to the way wires snake up automail--when Winry was younger, she imagined they grew into place.

47\. **butterfly**  
Winry stares at things that fly, at birds and bats and butterflies, and _wonders_.

48\. **gloves**  
She wishes Ed would take off his gloves once in a while; she likes the contrast between pliant skin and warm metal.

49\. **venom**  
There are still some trade secrets Pinako hasn't shared; when Winry discovers a trayful of liquid-filled vials, Pinako thwaps her hand and says simply, "Acid."

50\. **remain**  
Al writes letters to her, long and rambling ones, and Winry reads each of them with a sense of déjà vu.


End file.
